photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas head coach David Beaty tries to keep his team amped up during spring practice on Tuesday, March 24, 2015.

photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas head coach David Beaty tries to keep his team amped up during spring practice on Tuesday, March 24, 2015.

Throughout preseason camp and the start of the 2015 season, I’ve mentioned on multiple occasions how the Kansas University football coaching staff — and, because of them, the KU players — seems like a group that is willing to embrace the hard work required to rebuild things at Kansas.

What’s more, they all appear to be unfazed by bad results, tough times and the outside perception of the program.

A lot of little things have led me to believe this, from a glimpse of how things are run at practice to the way things are said during press conferences and some behind-the-scenes nuggets that I’ve heard about life in the KU football complex these days.

However, Monday morning, on the weekly Big 12 coaches teleconference, I heard one of the more concrete examples of this idea during KU coach David Beaty’s five-minute phone call with the media.

Asked, after back-to-back home losses dropped KU to 0-2 in Beaty’s first season as a Division I head coach, how he was handling the reality of the situation he had gotten himself into, Beaty as a beacon of positivity shined through.

The question: “About you, I’m just wondering how you’re holding up. Obviously this has been a career goal, to be a college coach, for a long time. After you finally got the opportunity, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen in your routine and what you’ve had to do to prepare over the first two weeks of the season?”

Beaty’s answer: “First of all, I’m holding up great,” he said with plenty of pep in his voice. “I’m still very, very excited about our football team. There’s a lot of things that we learned about our team in the last two weeks that are gonna help us moving forward. You know, our goal, from the very beginning, has been to get just a little bit better every week. Even though the score doesn’t show it, being 55-23, there was some things that we improved on in this football game.”

Beaty then went on to list a few of those areas of improvement, which included success in the turnover battle, on special teams and in the running game.

But, really, the specifics of his answer were irrelevant.

See, even though we’re just two weeks into the 2015 season, the whole thing has come down to this for Kansas football. And, really, it’s probably been about this all along: Success during the 2015 season will not be determined by wins and losses or point differential or anything like that. It’s about survival.

At this point, even with Rutgers in two weeks seeming like a potentially winnable game on paper, it’s unlikely that KU will win a game this season. That’s not to say it can’t happen. And that’s not to say this team won’t get better. I’m sure it will. But so will the other teams. And with KU starting from so far behind to begin with, that makes catching any of the other guys an almost impossible task.

Given that such thoughts seem to be universally accepted and are basically common knowledge on and around the KU campus, Beaty’s positivity looks all the more impressive.

photo by: John Young

Kansas women's basketball coach Brandon Schneider, football coach David Beaty and men's basketball coach Bill Self speak at KU Traditions Night Saturday evening at Memorial Stadium. The annual event held before the start of each new school year aims to teach incoming freshmen about the traditions that make KU unique. The three coaches all agreed that their favorite tradition was the Rock Chalk Chant at the end of games, signaling to the other team that the game was over.

Like many of you, I’ve seen this whole thing unfold before. But I’ve never seen it look or feel quite like this.

I remember Turner Gill talking, after almost every loss, about how it was “just one game.” The problem with that logic after a certain point was that it wasn’t just one game. It was an entire season. And then another one. And things never seemed to get better.

Enter Charlie Weis, whose loud personality and big bravado may have changed the sound of things but not the outcome. Weis, who rarely ever showed anything but extreme calm in the press conferences following losses, often sat there and said the same sorts of things as Gill, albeit in a different way — We just have to keep working and try to get better.

Both men did their best to remain poised and put forward a positive vibe. But neither were all that believable. Gill always looked to be in over his head and Weis always looked like he was trying to master the art of spin, therein making things sound, look and feel better than they truly were.

You won’t get any of that with Beaty. And, frankly, I’ve been incredibly impressed by that.

It’s not easy to remain positive — heck, it’s not even easy to start from a position of positivity — when you’re the one calling the shots and steering the ship for a program in as bad of shape as Kansas football.

But Beaty has. He’s been honest and open and realistic and forthright from the very beginning and continues to be that way today, even after a couple of bad losses, one to an FCS team that pushed KU around and the other in blowout fashion to a team with which KU absolutely should expect to be competitive.

0-2 but no boo hoo. Just more of the same from Mr. Enthusiasm.

photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas University football coach David Beaty gives a directive to his players from across the field during practice on Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015.

Don’t get me wrong, Beaty’s demeanor is not one of acceptance. He’s not happy KU is 0-2 and he does not believe it’s acceptable. But he definitely projects that he understands why they are, that he might even have been prepared for it to begin with and that he and the rest of his crew are willing to do whatever they have to do to keep working through it, good, bad or ugly.

“There’s some things that we can build on,” Beaty said Monday morning. “But there’s obviously some things that are giving us problems. The good news is, all of those things we saw on tape, those are all fixable. We just gotta be willing to step up and do ’em.”

This kind of attitude will not win games in 2015. But it could be the reason these kids stick around long enough and work hard enough to win games in 2016, 2017, 2018 and beyond.

Time will tell if that’s the case, but while we wait, one black and white aspect of the program that will be easy to track is Beaty’s disposition.

If he remains the same man and coach that he is today, I’ll have no problem saying that this coach and this staff have a real chance of finally being the bunch that gets KU going again. If he doesn’t and even he cracks under the weight and heavy load of lopsided losses piling up, it could be yet another bad sign for a program in desperate need of some positivity that Beaty tries to bring day in and day out.

Let the watch begin.